In current manufacturing processes, many products are built and shipped to exacting specifications. Because of this, every operation that affects a product is specified in detail. Each process specification may be related to a specific machine or to a specific type of machine. The manufacturing process consists of many processes requiring large amounts of related information and can become very large in most manufacturing facilities, resulting in inconsistent or conflicting specifications.
Each product within a manufacturing facility must follow a specified routing through the manufacturing process. Each specification for processing, either a step or a sequence of steps, must be well-defined and unambiguous to assure the correct equipment selection and processing. Generally, defining the processing for any product is accomplished through a process definition or process specification application.
Historically, process specifications have consisted of instructions for operating manufacturing equipment to achieve the desired processing effect. The desired effects include depositing a specific amount of material on a surface within certain constraints such as deposition rate and uniformity, or removing a specified material selectively. This consisted of a knowledgeable process engineer specifying how to manipulate the various controls on specific machines, covering anything from the number of stitches for one specific sewing machine to the atmospheric pressure on a machine which controls a chemical reaction.
A better and less error prone method is to specify the effect of the process on the product without having to describe the details of how the effect is to be achieved. This can only be accomplished if all of the application software in a Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) system are supported by a unified information repository containing all information related to the manufacturing environment. This repository must provide different views for the various applications such as schedulers, line load balancers, and process controllers.
Thus, what is needed is an information repository infrastructure which allows all process specification and manufacturing software applications to make use of a library of manufacturing components available for a given manufacturing environment to create consistent, unambiguous specifications and to facilitate selection of processing equipment at the time the process is performed.